Ride and Die
by TheRealKLT
Summary: Between the events of the fourth and fifth movie, Letty is given an ultimatum from a mysterious stranger, choosing to become the Ghost Rider, a spirit of vengeance on the hunt for Braga.


Letty opened her eyes in a graveyard.

It was definitely Los Angeles; she could smell the smog, something like exhaust fumes mixed with forest fires. _Home_. Or someplace not too far away, at least. Letty craned her neck to the sides, searching for any sign of which graveyard, exactly – something that would help with finding her bearings. It was too dark; even the streetlights that lined the road were out. There was nothing but miles of faintly outlined headstones against a blue-black sky. Letty's head hurt. _Keep it together_ , she told herself, as her breathing started to speed up. _This isn't nothin'_. She could just follow the road; eventually it would bring her to the main gate, and from there she could flag down a car or a taxi, tell them to take her back to 1327. She was home. There was nothing to be afraid of at home. She was…

But hadn't she just been somewhere else?

Thunder clapped between her ears. There was a flash, not of lightning, but of images. Incomprehensible images made not from just sight, but from all her many senses. She felt the rumble of an engine around her and the vibration of an unmaintained road beneath tires. She could taste her own sweat, feeling it dripping down her temple. It was nighttime there too, wherever what she was seeing was, somewhere far away. Headlights, both hers, illuminated the dark, gravel road. Then another set to her left, coming up fast. She heard nothing but engines, screaming so close, but distant. Her adrenaline pumped like nitro in her bloodstream. Letty felt her hands veer, but the second set of headlights clipped her. She felt the collision, the wheel whipping underneath her fingers, the world careening around her, rolling, spinning. Letty felt gravity pulling her seemingly in every direction. She felt her body rattling around, smacking this way and that, like a flesh pinball in a steel can. Then it stopped and there was smoke in her lungs; smoke and then the heat that would follow. She felt the flames, scorching, melting…

Letty retched up bile onto the manicured grass.

"It's good you get that out now," someone said. "It was bound to happen." A few paces away, perched atop one of the headstones, was a man. He looked comfortable there, though the narrow stone should have been doing a number on his ass. His wardrobe was plain and pallid; gray relaxed fit jeans beneath a floral-print shirt, white, with faintly gray flowers, and a white cap. His jacket, though, was brown pleather, as were his shoes. "Everyone always pukes. You should've seen Caesar."

Letty straightened her spine, widening her stance a bit. "Who are you?"

"I've been called by a lot of names over the years," the man said, hopping down off the headstone and leaning against it. "For the time being, why don't you just refer to me as… Rags."

"Makes sense; your threads are shit."

Rags ignored her, though his lips twitched the promise of a smirk. "I think the more important question tonight, my spunky friend, is who are _you_?" He gestured with his hand, something between a point and Vanna White showcasing a godawful minivan to an ecstatic mom in a pastel pantsuit.

Letty followed the aim of his fingers with her eyes, seeing nothing. "What," she said, looking at Rags, "the grave?" He gave her a kind nod, and she turned back to the headstone. "I don't see shi-" but then her brown eyes finally adjusted to the dim light, and she could make out lettering on the headstone. Letty's heart went cold. It read: _LETICIA ORTIZ_. "What is this, some kind of fucking joke?"

"I would never joke about something like this, Leticia," Rags said, solemn faced.

Letty did _not_ like that face. She stalked up to him, two fast strides, and she swung – a right hook, tight, elbow in. It should've taken him clean in the jaw, knocked out a tooth or two, but it didn't. She missed. She shouldn't have missed. Her aim was perfect. How did she miss? Something was off, and she stumbled from the lost momentum, nearly planting herself face-first in the grass if it weren't for her grabbing hold onto a nearby headstone. Letty could hear Rags behind her, tutting. "Fuck you," she spat.

"I haven't done anything," Rags said. "I'm just here to give you a choice."

Letty's body slumped against the headstone. Her hand instinctively went to the diamond cross between her breasts, but it wasn't there. "So, what are you saying, am I dead? Am I buried down there, or what?"

"You are on the shoulder of a deserted road just outside the United States, Mexico border. Your arm has a compound fracture in two places and your leg is broken. You're lying in a mangled wreck that's leaking gasoline severely, and there's a rather large man with a shotgun pointed at your head." Rags shrugged, as if to imply helplessness. "I've slowed things down, but the trigger is pulling and the gasoline is sparking. It's only a matter of time, I'm afraid."

 _This can't be happening_. But it was, wasn't it? She couldn't be dreaming; it was too vivid, too real. Letty felt the injuries creeping up on her already, her left arm had started throbbing below the elbow, and her right leg was tingling pins and needles, as though it had suddenly fallen asleep. "What are you, the Ghost of Letty's Future?"

"Possible future," Rags said. " _Likely_ future. Unless..."

Letty forced her back to straighten with some difficulty from her lifeless leg. She was starting to sweat coldly, suddenly flushed red. Heat from the crash? Shock? Maybe both. "Unless what?" Her voice broke.

"Unless you choose to serve."

Letty laughed, and immediately regretted it. Her lungs ached, and she almost hacked one up. "Serve who," she said, wheezing, "you? No thanks, _pendejo_."

It was Rags' turn to laugh, though his did not end quite so pathetically. "No, not me," he said, "something far bigger, far greater. Consider me just a ... manager, if you will. A supervisor."

There were spots in front of her eyes now, static on the screen. Was everything spinning? "Supervising what, exactly?"

"Justice," Rags said. "Violent, _righteous justice_. You've done much worse for lesser reasons, haven't you? You don't have to answer, because of course you have. I know you, Leticia. I know you very well, and you deserve to stay here, among the living. You deserve to stay with your..." Rags paused, and for a moment Letty swore she could feel Dom's muscular arms around her. She could almost smell the sweet tang of motor-oil on his body. "... _Family_."

There were tendrils of smoke rising off Letty's jacket then. Her hand went for the cross again, clutching nothing - she had to hold on to something. "What do I have to do?"

"Say the words and it'll be done." Rags inched closer. "Just say it."

Letty's top lip curled. "I'll… _serve_ ," she snarled. _I'll do what I have to. For you._

An image in her mind: Dom, smiling at an altar. Dom, holding out her cross to her.

Rags' smiled from ear to ear, reminding her of the Cheshire cat. "This may hurt a little," he said, and as soon as the words left his lips Letty knew that they were a cruel understatement. If you've ever known pleasure; if you've ever felt your breath vanish, your vision blur, every muscle in your body from your toes to your lip tense and curl in perfect pleasure, outside of time, so intense you almost felt outside _your self_ – think of its equal opposition, because that was the pain the Letty felt as her body was engulfed in gasoline flame and everything that she was, body and soul, was stripped and laid bone bare, reduced to a shrieking matchstick.

In the rippled haze of the heat, she saw Rags for what he truly was: Smoke and steel, light and void; a shape devoid of shape, hooded and empty. He was immense, yet microscopic. Corporeal, yet without mass. He was there, but not there. Impossible, but existing. At once, the name _Rags_ was hilarious, in the insanity of death, for was he not royalty? Raguel the Fair, Reuel the Just, Akrasiel the Vengeful. Letty could see his wings because they were made of _everything_.

And he was laughing.

Then it stopped, and she wasn't standing on her grave anymore. Letty found herself on a dim gravel road, lit by a single streetlight and the flicker of flame. Rags was no longer in front of her. For a moment, she didn't recognize the person who was. His dark skin, his mohawk, the scar underneath his right eye – all foreign to her, but then she remembered. " _FENIX_ ," she boomed, in not one voice of hers, but a legion of them. His name echoed loud enough to free bats from their roosts. Fenix still had the shotgun leveled at her, but he was trembling. His face drained of color.

Fenix took a step back from her. " _Quedarse atrás, puta demonio!_ "

" _ESTAS MUERTO, CONO_ ," Letty's voices said, and this time the very earth trembled. The chain seemed to snap out on its own accord; twisted links of red-hot iron, stronger than steel, crafted in Hades for her and her alone. It bound Fenix's neck in three turns before he could react, and by then it was too late, but it was too late from the beginning, wasn't it? His shotgun went off, fired wildly into the air as the chain wrapped around it too, pressing the hot barrel against the notch between his collarbones. The barrel was the least of his pains, as his flesh began to sizzle and pop like rendering pork fat beneath the heavy links, fit for a Cerberus, let alone a man.

"Oh, Fenix…" Letty spoke in her normal voice, mocking singsong – even more unsettling singular than it had been sundry. She yoked the chain, tearing Fenix forward. His lifeless body came to her, like a yoyo on a string. Letty caught him by the neck with a hand clad in a leather driving glove. Fenix was conscious, she could tell, because he was crying as he beheld what she had become: A grinning, porcelain-white skull, hued in blue licks beneath an orange blaze. "I think we should kiss and make up," and that grin seemed true. Letty opened her mouth wide, and the flame the poured out took the flesh off Fenix like candle wax.

Fenix's remains were unceremoniously discarded on the side of the road.

"An excellent start," Rags said, clapping behind her. He stood beside the wreck of her car, and when the smoke danced across his form, Letty could catch a glimpse of his true self through the veil of it. "Very entertaining, I must say. Your rage is"—he seemed to savor—"exquisite, Leticia. You can't be sated with that small fry. You need a bigger meal, don't you?"

" _BRAGA_ ," Letty said, and her skull burned hotter, cracking like a campfire.

Rags smiled. "You'll need transport," and he gestured to the scorched, vehicular corpse of what she had crashed in—when? It already seemed like centuries since then. "It may not look like much anymore," Rags said, "but smoke and metal and flame are your elements now, Leticia. Recreate it from its own ashes; let it be as much the phoenix as you have become and it will be loyally yours for all eternity, as inseparable as the human soul—well, to one of the living."

Letty didn't have to try, it just happened; willed from her need, like the chain had been. First, the smoke took shape, swirling wrongly, and then solidifying in a flowing, misty chassis. Fire was next, filling the chassis with its thrumming, burning light. Flames coiled and flattened into a blockhead, and an engine was formed - pistons pumping, fans spinning, countless cylinders revving. What was left of the body was last, but now it was hardened by trial; sheets of metal sliding into place, rubbing against each other with the force of tectonic plates until finally settling where they needed to be. Glass and rubber were nothing to her, in the last moments, and they found their rightful places. It was a Balrog in the shape of a 1973 Jensen Interceptor, more beast than machine. It roared at her, the way a baby might scream as it breathes for the first time.

"Perfect," Rags said, with real admiration in his eyes. "Go, and do good work."

Letty climbed inside her new car, or did it embrace her? It felt her, she knew. Her hand caressed the steering wheel and it purred back at her, gently ferocious. "Hello, sweetheart," Letty said, and her face was hers again, for the time being. In response, the radio spun static until landing on _Un Alma Sentenciada_. Letty smiled wanly, running a hand across the polished dashboard. Her foot found the pedal, and the tired screeched, fishtailing briefly, as she tore off into the rising dawn. _I'm coming for you Braga_ , she thought, her hair caught in the wind.

A voice, bodiless: "Her husband is a liability."

"I know," Rags said. "But not for long."


End file.
